In the Realm of the Senses

Nagisa Oshima took the 1936 Sada Abe case, a maid who strangled her lover mid-embrace and then carried his severed genitals around Tokyo, and filmed it with the sex unsimulated and the obsession played dead straight. To get it made he ran it as a French co-production and shipped the undeveloped negative to Paris, because doing any of this in a Japanese lab would have been a crime, and customs officers around the world seized it anyway. The two lovers wall themselves into a room and turn a love affair into a closed loop that can only end one way, and Oshima frames the escalation as tragedy rather than titillation. It is explicit to a degree almost nothing since has matched, and entirely humourless about it. The one time hardcore was pointed at something and hit it.